So are many, many others. The Justice Ministry recently issued a report noting that the ranks of the dreaded Aum Shinrikyo cult are again increasing. Even though the cult's members killed 12 people and injured several thousand in a 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, the government decided last year on the basis of a narrow interpretation of the law that it could not ban the group--to the incredulity of many Japanese. Now the cult, which preaches Armageddon as the route to salvation, is attracting new recruits from the lost generation, provoking widespread alarm. "These days there is no harmony among people," observes Kojun Kobayashi, 32, a monk at the Sennyuji temple in Kyoto. He rises before dawn to pray, his feet barely making a sound as he walks along the wooden corridors of the 700-year-old monastery. "People on television ask what Buddhist monks are doing to stop people going to cults like Aum," he says. It's hard to find answers. At high school Kobayashi was fascinated by science fiction and the boom in Buddhist and Christian cults. His temple belongs to the Shingon sect, whose central rite is the fire ceremony, goma, in which novice monks burn pine branches and recite sutras for seven days. "Yes, this is the mystical side. But if it goes too far it will become a cult. I think emotionally we want to have someone like a strong father to depend on. If I were not here it is possible I could have joined Aum. One of my friend's friends was an Aum member, and he is still missing."

Japan has 183,886 officially registered cults.

"So many sick things have happened," says Haruki Murakami, one of Japan's leading novelists (A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). "These poisoners--they feel they have no way out, feel they are in a cul de sac." Two years ago Murakami, 48, wrote Underground, a nonfiction account of the 1995 subway attack. He has interviewed survivors and Aum cult members. "I am a fiction maker," he says. "Shoko Asahara [Aum's leader] is, too. If making a story is white magic, what Asahara did was black magic. But sometimes black magic attracts people. It is very strong."

Murakami prefers to write his books in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Hawaii--anywhere outside Japan, beyond the mental box. In his own land, he cannot get the distance he needs. "Japan is a comfortable country," says Murakami. "Even living inside the group in Aum was comfortable, those people thought. But there was a dark side, well-hidden, and all of a sudden someone opened the door and the dark side came out. We had good fiction after the war, when the economy was getting better and we were getting happier--that was a kind of religion. But we lost all that, and now we need a new fiction, a new religion."

Japan's original fiction, according to legend, involved the sun goddess, Amaterasu, retreating into a cave and plunging the world into darkness. Only after much destruction and suffering could she be enticed out of the cave again. Today when people are asked what they think of the future they commonly answer kuraku naru--"it's getting darker." Japan, and the world, can only hope it will not take another Armageddon for the country to find its new guiding light.

With reporting by Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo

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